While the US was transfixed by posturing over the Trump presidency, China has been building the future. Chances are you’ll find one part of that future – social credit scoring – both appalling in principle and irresistible in practice. That at least is the lesson I draw from our interview of Mara Hvistendahl, National Fellow at New America and author of the definitive article on the allure, defects and mechanics of China’s emerging social credit system.

In the litigation outrage of the month, a company called Keeper (apparently a competitor of LastPass and other password managers) got caught distributing software with a security flaw. So they did what any security-conscious company would – they sued the website that publicized the flaw for libel. It’s a crappy suit, and we should all hope they end up assessed with costs and fees. But the real question is this: Google found and disclosed the flaw, while Microsoft distributed Keeper to its users. When will they file as amici to say that no company with a mature security model files STFU libel suits against people who point out legitimate security problems? TL;DR – Keeper: Loser.

Finally, Hal Martin pleads guilty to one of twenty-plus counts and takes a ten-year sentence. So far, so ordinary in the world of plea bargaining. But as Nick points out, this wasn’t a bargain. Martin can still be tried and sentenced on all the other counts. And it effectively stipulates the maximum sentence for the one count he’s pleading guilty to. There must be a strategy here, but we can’t say for sure what it is.

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

In this episode, I interview Elsa Kania, author of a Center for a New American Security report on China’s plan for military uses of artificial intelligence – a plan that seems to have been accelerated by the asymmetric impact of AlphaGo on the other side of the Pacific.

I take a victory lap, as the Director of National Intelligence promises to apply the Gates procedures to unmasking of transition officials. As recommended by me (well, and the House Intelligence Committee). No need to call them the Baker procedures, though, guys.

Bleeping Computer says Germany is planning backdoors into modern devices. Maybe so, I offer, but whether that includes encryption is not at all clear.

Finally, Nick digs into the remarkable work that Citizen Lab and Bill Marczak continue to do on authoritarian government hacking. He says, with evidence, that efforts to control sales to untrustworthy governments are actually working.

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

Episode 195 features an interview with Susan Hennessey of Lawfare and Andrew McCarthy of the National Review. They walk us through the “unmasking” of US identities in intelligence reports — one of the most divisive partisan issues likely to come up in the re-enactment of section 702 of FISA. I bask momentarily in the glow of being cast as a civil liberties extremist. And Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose offers insights into 702 reform.

Steptoe partner Stewart Baker with Susan Hennessey

In the news roundup, I try to count votes after the Supreme Court argument in Carpenter v. United States. I count at least four likely votes to require a warrant for cell phone location data and only two likely votes for the United States (and the preservation of the third party doctrine). The other Justices didn’t exactly wear their votes on their sleeve, but the smart money favors a whole new ballgame for criminal discovery. The Court’s biggest problem will be finding a rationale that doesn’t open up decades of litigation. Justice Gorsuch distinguishes himself with a rationale that is creative, libertarian-conservative, and, well, cockamamie.

Phil West provides the tech angle on the biggest Congressional news — tax reform and what it means for Silicon Valley

Meanwhile, Uber’s problems seem neverending. The latest disaster focuses on the company’s use of quick-to-vanish messaging services like Wickr and Telegram. Such services are popular among “Technorati” who like to fancy themselves as targets of government surveillance. Problem is, when they are under surveillance, or just a discovery obligation, the use of evanescent messaging is often seen as a sign of guilt. This messaging movement could turn out to be extremely costly – first for Uber and then for Silicon Valley in general. I’m not sure that putting employees on the honor system not to use those services for company business is going to be enough.

Steptoe’s Government Contracts Group recently issued an interesting advisory for defense contractors:

The end of the year approaches and that means Department of Defense (DoD) contractors must make changes to their own unclassified information systems to comply with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-171, Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Information Systems and Organizations.

This advisory provides an overview of the clause and identifies recently released guidance from DoD and NIST to assist with implementation of the NIST standards. Click here to read more.

As the deadline approaches for the EU General Data Protection Regulation to take effect, please join us for Part I of a Steptoe webinar series titled “The Long Arm of the New EU Data Protection Jurisdiction” on Wednesday, December 6 from 5:00 – 6:00 pm CET. Click here to register.

Our interview this week is with Rob Reid, author of After On and Year Zero, two books that manage to translate serious technology nightmares into science fiction romps. We cover a lot of ground: synbio and giving eighth graders the tools for mass human extinction, the possibility that artificial intelligence will achieve takeoff and begin to act counter to humanity’s interests in a matter of hours. Along the way, we consider the possibility that the first AI will arise from a social media behemoth and will devote its exponential power to maximizing human hookups.

In the news, we explore the massive PR disaster that is the Uber data breach and reach the surprising conclusion that the whole thing may turn out worse in the media than in the courts. Except in the EU, Maury Shenk reminds me. Europe just hates Uber viscerally. So much so that Jim Lewis suggests the company’s EU subsidiary will soon have to be renamed Unter.

I note the release of the ODNI’s report on the intelligence community’s “masking” of US identities in intel reports. We talk about the temptation to weaponized unmasking during transitions, and I ask why the “Gates procedures” that provide special protection for unmasking of Congressional identities shouldn’t also be used to protect Presidential transition teams.

I note that Sen. Wyden (D-OR) has another campaign underway to imply that the Justice Department is imposing decryption assistance requirements under FISA without judicial review. In fact, if there is such an effort, the company on the receiving end already has a judicial remedy. And Maury explains that the head of Germany’s new cybersecurity agency is joining the German government chorus arguing for “hack back,” but only by the German government.

My candidate for Dumbest Public Policy Battle of the Season: The complaint that someone faked a bunch of meaningless, content-free comments on net neutrality. The problem is really the idea that the policy debate should be influenced by counting votes in the World’s Skeeviest Online Poll, an idea that seems to have sparked a kind of bot arms race between supporters and opponents of the FCC’s policy.

And my candidate for Coolest Technology Story of the Season: Feeding graphene to spiders and discovering that it greatly strengthens their webs. Every fifteen-year-old science fair participant should take heart: It turns out that with great quantities of graphene comes great responsibility.

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

We celebrate the holiday season by interviewing David Ignatius, Columnist and Associate Editor at The Washington Post and the author of multiple spy thrillers, including his most recent, The Quantum Spy. David and I discuss themes from the book, from quantum computing to ethnic and gender tensions at the Agency, while managing to avoid spoilers. It’s a fun and insightful work.

Steptoe partner Stewart Baker with David Ignatius.

In the news, I flag Twitter’s weird journey from the free speech wing of the free speech party to the censorship wing of the Censor’s Party. Twitter is now revoking the verification checks for people whose speech it disapproves of. It’s even de-checking people based on its assessment of their off-line conduct. So maybe that should be the Stasi wing of the Censor’s Party. And, not surprisingly, given Silicon Valley’s steep leftward-tilt, the censorship seems to fall far more harshly on the right than on less PC targets.

Markham Erickson and I treat Twitter’s wobbly stance as a symptom of the breakdown of the Magaziner Consensus, as both left and right for their own reasons come to view Big Tech with suspicion. Markham has shrewd observations about what it all means for the (questionable) future of social media’s section 230 immunity.

We dive into a surprising new analysis of China’s “50c Army.” Turns out that the Chinese government strategy for flooding the internet is 180 degrees off from Russia’s. Instead of a Trollfest, Chinese government-funded social media is saccharine sweet. Cheerleading and changing the subject are what its army does best.

With the Texas church shooting having put encryption back on the front burner, I claim that Apple is becoming the FBI’s crazy ex-girlfriend in Silicon Valley — and offer the tapes to prove it. When Nick Weaver rises to Apple’s defense, I point out that Apple responded to a Chinese government man-in-the-middle attack on iCloud users with spineless obfuscation rather than a brave defense of user privacy. Nick asks for a citation. Here it is: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203126 (Careful: don’t click without a chiropractor standing by.) Nick provides actual news to supplement the NYT’s largely news-free front page story about leak and mole fears at NSA. I gloat, briefly, over hackback’s new respectability, as the ACDC act acquires new cosponsors, including Trey Gowdy, and hacking back acquires new respectability. But not everywhere. Michael Sulmeyer finally gets a word in edgewise as the conversation shifts to the NDAA passes. He discusses the MGT Act, the growing Armed Services Committee oversight of cyberoperations, and the decision to lift — and perhaps separate — Cyber Command from NSA. I take issue with any decision that requires that a three-star NSA director argue intelligence equities with a four-star combatant commander. We end with Michael Sulmeyer and I walking through the challenges for DoD of deterring cyberattacks. We both end up expressing skepticism about the current path.

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

191: Election security may be better than you think. Unless you live in New Jersey.

Episode 191 is our long-awaited election security podcast before a live, and lively, audience. Our panel consists of Chris Krebs, formerly of Microsoft and now the top cybersecurity official at DHS (with the longest title in the federal government as proof), and Ed Felten, formerly the deputy CTO of the federal government and currently Princeton professor focused on cybersecurity and policy. We walk through the many stages of election machinery and the many ways that digitizing those stages has introduced new insecurities into our election results.

When all is said and done, however, the entire panel ends up more or less in one place: Election security is not to be taken for granted; it will be hard to achieve, but it’s not impossible, or even unaffordable. With sufficient will and focus, and perhaps a touch of Ned Ludd, we may be able to overcome the risk of foreign hackers interfering in our elections. At least outside of New Jersey.

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

In our 190th episode Stewart Baker has a chance to interview United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has a long history of engagement with technology and security issues. In this episode, we spend a remarkably detailed half-hour with him, covering the cybersecurity waterfront, from the FBI’s problems accessing the Texas church shooter’s phone, and what Silicon Valley should do about that, to Vladimir Putin’s electoral adventurism and how to combat it. Along the way, we touch (skeptically) on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and more enthusiastically on allowing private citizens to leave their networks to track the hackers who’ve attacked them. Plus: botnet cures, praise for Microsoft, a cybersecurity inspector general (or, maybe, bug bounties), DHS’s role in civilian cybersecurity, and how much bigger Rhode Island really is at low tide!

As always The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com or leave a message at +1 202 862 5785.

Stewart Baker

Stewart served as the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security where he set cybersecurity policy, including inward investment reviews focused on network security. More

About This Blog

Steptoe Cyberblog, with its sometimes contrasting insights, serves up opinionated and provocative thoughts on the issues — especially cybersecurity and privacy — that arise at the intersection of law, information technology, and security.

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